'Burgh Vivant: Pretty, perky, pleasantly plump. Tracy Turnblad (Caroline Connell) is a teenager in 1962 Baltimore. Her hair reflects the times – with so much applied hairspray that even a 50 mile-an-hour wind does not move it. She loves to dance and rushes home from high school every day to watch the dancers on the local “Corny Collins Show,” the show within the show in “Hairspray.”
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This review didn’t really go into any specifics of the performance, which I thought was odd. It did cover the plot of hairspray which was unsurprisingly the same as any other hairspray production. The last five lines of text were compliments to the cast and crew with a couple specific mentions, but overall I thought this was a poorly written review. When I see a show I usually have a lot of specific compliments and a few specific critiques. Maybe because this show is so old, there’s not a lot of things to change because they’ve pretty much been set in stone. I could believe that seeing a show for the Nth time makes us leave our critical brain behind and just experience it, which is both a blessing and a curse. A show like Hairspray doesn’t require critical thinking as much, but rather emotional investment. I don’t think this really accomplished the goal of a review.
18 years after the show, Hairspray opened on Broadway, Tracy Turnblad and the great members of The Corny Collins Show are finally coming to Japan in 2020!!! Yay!!! Unfortunately, I won’t be back in Japan yet, but I am very excited to see what kind of reaction will Japanese audience have. Currently, the show is already holding the attention of Japanese theatre critics for a reason. In Japan, it is still common to black-paint actor’s skin when they are acting black characters. Putting aside whether I agree or not, it is very common that they do not doubt anything about it. If they were questioned about it, they would say that it is necessary since we are not a multiethnic country. However, Hairspray Japan, regarded this subject for the first time. The theatre company announced that although the casts are all Japanese, there will be no black-paint. I think this decision will have great influence on the future Japanese musical industry.
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